In this tech-centric world, it’s important to utilize every tool in the digital marketing toolbox to its fullest potential. This ensures that your tickets get in front of the most applicable audiences, leading to great conversion rates that create new fans and fill seats. Digital marketing services are varied, all serving disparate and important functions.

What are the main digital marketing opportunities?

Search marketing ensures that your content comes up first to consumers looking up targeted keywords, while display marketing delivers graphics-based ads during web browsing. YouTube and Facebook are growing channels, with exciting creative providing strong returns. YouTube shows compelling video content to users prior to them watching other media, white Facebook events marketing leverages the site’s API to push event data directly into the social network’s ecosystem.

One of the strongest essential digital marketing tools is retargeting.

Retargeting — which tracks consumers that visited your website but did not purchase, and serves them online banner advertisements to purchase tickets to your events — is a worthwhile tool to understand. It’s especially important because, on average, 98 percent of all website visitors leave without making a purchase.

There are many benefits to retargeting, including to serve ads to customers who have already expressed interest in your event, capturing those ‘low-hanging fruit.’ It’s a flexible tool, with organizations quickly able to enact new campaigns or modify existing advertising creative based on shifting objectives. Plus, it’s an opportunity that is becoming more and more valuable as technology continues to accelerate, leading to new and improved opportunities such as cross-device promotions.

Paciolan has increased ticket sales for dozens of clients using retargeting as a key tool in digital marketing campaigns for more than six years, and currently serves more than 140 clients with hundreds of concurrent campaigns. We’ve seen an average Return On Ad Spend of about $12:$1, with some campaigns reaching as high as a $22:$1 return for our clients.

Based on the success that we have experienced managing retargeting campaigns for our clients, Paciolan wanted to provide some tips to make sure you’re doing everything you can to maximize this asset’s potential.

• The ideal run time for a retargeting campaign is 6-8 weeks when focused around a single run of events. This gives the campaign enough time to reach full momentum. 
• If a campaign runs longer than 8 weeks, it’s a good idea to switch out creative to prevent creative fatigue. Look into changing up artwork on this timeline, or halfway through the season if designing a campaign around a particular sport or performing arts season.
• For college athletics or performing arts seasons, enact a generic tickets campaign throughout the entire season. This gives you the largest potential audience to work with. If you want to target specific rival games or events, it’s helpful to run game- or event-specific campaigns simultaneously.
• Run multiple sets of ads simultaneously. Different ads may appeal to different customers. For instance, the creative featuring a family enjoying an outing may appeal to those with children, while images featuring super-fans in the student section may catch the eye of those attending university.
• It’s always possible to do A/B testing with these ads. See which ones perform best for your program and respond nimbly and accordingly.
• Try to include social (Facebook and Instagram) retargeting with every campaign. Cross Device (where ads will show up in a potential customer’s Mobile News Feed) and Instagram perform very well as they include any mobile-only audiences. Organizations have seen results on the mobile ads ranging from an $8 - $20 : $1 return!
• For best results, utilize all channels available including web, Facebook Right-Hand Column, Facebook News Feed, Facebook Cross Device, and Instagram.
• If it’s something your organization hasn’t tried before and you’re wary, know that it doesn’t need to take a huge investment, either. You can start seeing returns even with a small initial spend.

Retargeting continues to gain momentum as a strong digital marketing tool. Plus, it’s measurable! Rich and instant analytics allow for quick feedback and the ability to quickly refine campaign tactics. It is a great way to increase online ticket sales and keep your message top of mind.